Our Founding Foremothers

American Cookery

By Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan

(Dover Books, 1984 [1796]; $3.95)

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The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book

By Fannie Merritt Farmer

(Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1996 [1896]; $24.95)

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This year is a double anniversary in American cooking. It’s the bicentennial of the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’ “American Cookery,” and the centennial of the most influential American cookbook, Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.” Conveniently, both books are in print. The Fannie Farmer edition is actually a facsimile of Farmer’s personal copy, complete with a couple of her handwritten corrections.

Simmons, as she reminded the reader several times, was “an American Orphan.” With a benevolent eye to the newly independent country’s future, she offered advice on what food sources her readers ought to cultivate, including rabbits and English beans. (They clearly didn’t heed her about the English beans, or we wouldn’t have had to borrow an Italian name for them, favas, in this century.)

She also championed the potato: “A roast Potatoe is brought on with roast Beef, a Steake, a Chop, or Fricassee; good boiled with a boiled dish; make an excellent stuffing for a turkey, water or wild fowl; make a good pie, and a good starch for many uses.”

And when it came to apples, you might as well call her Amelia Appleseed. “There is not a single family,” she proclaimed, “but might set [an apple] tree in some otherwise useless spot, which might serve the two fold use of shade and fruit . . . and essentially preserve the orchard from the intrusions of boys, &c.;, which is too common in America.

“If the boy who thus planted a tree, and guarded and protected it . . . was to be indulged free access into orchards, whilst the neglectful boy was prohibited--how many millions of fruit trees would spring into growth--and what a saving to the union. The net saving would in time extinguish the public debt, and enrich our cookery.”

In Simmons’ day, plagiarism was the usual way of writing cookbooks, as it had been since the Middle Ages. Other cookbooks had been published in this country before “American Cookery,” but they were all pirated editions of English cookbooks. Simmons lifted her share of recipes from earlier books, but what made her work different was that it was the first to reflect American tastes and to use ingredients easily available here.

She gets credit for giving the first known recipes for pumpkin pie and three New England cornmeal preparations--Indian pudding, slapjacks and johnnycakes. She was the first person in the world to publish recipes for raising cakes with baking soda, or rather pearlash (potassium carbonate), a homemade ancestor of baking soda extracted from wood ashes.

This alone makes her an important figure. But some people have given her credit for recipes she actually didn’t give. Modern American gingerbread, for instance. In addition to recipes for the thin, hard gingerbread the English had always made--the sort of thing you could imagine making a gingerbread house out of--she had one for what she called “soft gingerbread to be baked in pans,” which, as several writers have pointed out, sounds like the familiar American gingerbread of today.

But her “soft gingerbread” recipe doesn’t contain anything to make it rise. True, the texture is soft, but it’s not as open and crumbly as our gingerbread; this particular “gingerbread” is like a thick, heavily shortened cookie. And since it’s sweetened with sugar instead of molasses, the flavor makes us think of an ordinary white cake flavored with ginger and rosewater.

Simmons does give a pearlash-risen gingerbread, which is a bit closer, but it’s rather cookie-like too, baking up three quarters of an inch thick at the most. Like the gingerbread we know, it’s sweetened with molasses--but there’s no ginger in it, only cinnamon and coriander.

She’s also been credited with a watermelon pickle recipe, but her recipe for preserved watermelon rind contains no vinegar, so it’s not a pickle at all--it’s just rind boiled with sugar. The heading of the recipe, “The American Citron,” tells what was really going on. Simmons was giving a homespun substitute for candied citron peel.

Shopping was a challenge in her day. Simmons had to warn her readers that butter packed in pine firkins (tubs) was sure to have a bad flavor. “Veal bro’t to market in panniers [baskets], or in carriages,” she cautioned, “is to be prefered to that bro’t in [saddle-] bags, and flouncing on a sweaty horse.”

Cooking was really a challenge. The kitchen range wasn’t widely available until the 1830s, so people mostly cooked in their fireplaces. Baking was done in a closed container set on the hearth, along the lines of the Dutch oven.

As a result, Simmons’ meat cookery consists mostly of roasts. Her only complex meat recipes, apart from turtle and calf’s head, were for what she called “alamode beef,” which was a round stuffed with meat and bread crumbs, braised or steamed for several hours.

She also told how to roast a chicken stuffed with oysters and then serve it smothered in more oysters. Roast turkey was already associated with boiled onions and cranberry sauce, but marjoram was the herb for the dressing, not sage. (“Sage is used in Cheese and Pork,” she wrote, “but not generally approved.”)

Her main focus--which puts her squarely in the mainstream of American cooking--was dessert. In the 18th century style, the full title of her book ran 47 words long and was really a list of all the book’s contents. The only word printed in type as large as “American Cookery” was “cakes”; two-thirds of the recipes were for pastries and other sweets.

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One of the main subjects of the book was pie, and the section titled “pies” was just the beginning; it listed only the large “standing” pies, usually filled with meat, which were an old-fashioned way of preserving food. Her fruit tarts were more like what we mean by pie.

But even they would seem a bit peculiar to us. Her apple tart was scented with rosewater, wine and orange juice; meanwhile, she put some apples in her orange tart. The marmalade pie didn’t have an orange flavor, because in Simmons’ day marmalade was a preserve made from quinces. Her apricot tart recipe, like many in the 19th century, insists that you should leave the pits in the fruit.

Many of her puddings were actually what we’d call pies. The word “pudding” had originally meant sausage. Around Shakespeare’s time, the English started filling sausage casings with sweet mixtures of fat, flour and eggs in place of meat, and they have gone on boiling or steaming their puddings in some kind of container, such as a cloth or a pudding mold, ever since. Often there’s a crust around an English steamed pudding. In America, we have taken to simmering or baking the pudding mixture by itself.

Simmons was at a halfway stage in this development. She gave recipes for four puddings boiled in bags and 11 baked in pans, including carrot, potato and squash puddings. Seven more, including her pumpkin and apple “puddings,” were baked in a crust, and they’d look pretty much like pies to us. (Incidentally, two of her rice puddings and both her bread puddings were baked in crust.)

The cakes so boldly advertised on the title page of “American Cookery” were mostly yeast-raised and flavored with dried fruit. They were more like either raisin scones or fruitcakes than what we think of as cake. One of them, “a light Cake to bake in small cups,” though it wouldn’t taste much like a cupcake to us, is one of the first evidences of the unique American taste for cup-sized cakes.

The cake chapter also described pancakes and several kinds of pound cake and gave two of the earliest cookie recipes. (Incidentally, the recipe Evan Jones gives for Simmons’ cookies in “American Food: The Gastronomic Story” has little in common with the original recipe except the coriander flavoring.) Simmons’ cookies were rather bready, calling for five cups of flour to half a cup of butter. Cookies were particularly associated with Christmas.

Then came recipes for custards and creams, one of them optionally flavored with musk, and for an English trifle with its traditional topping of syllabub, a froth of cream and egg whites whipped with wine. The book ends with recipes for preserving fruit in syrup, making pickles (including “mangoes” an imitation of the spicy East Indian mango pickle using muskmelons) and how to cook various vegetables--basically by boiling them.

Along the way, Simmons mentioned a fair amount of weirdness, such as a belief that moonlight makes salmon spoil. All in all, her book reminds us of the time when America was basically a rough, provincial place inhabited by English people who had, to the world’s amazement and somewhat to their own, cut loose from their mother country.

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By Fannie Farmer’s time, we were no longer just secondhand Britons living in a remote corner of the world. America had spread across a continent and absorbed millions of immigrants from scores of countries. At the same time, it had become the world’s leading industrial power.

To the cook, this meant loads of modern conveniences, starting with wood-burning, then coal-burning and finally gas-burning ranges. Farmer’s book presumes the existence of Mason jars, wax paper, canned tomatoes, margarine and rotary eggbeaters. She was accustomed to vegetables shipped by refrigerated railroad car from California.

Her sort of cookery is vastly more familiar to us than Simmons’. Instead of antique dishes like Shrewsbury cake, whitpot and stew pie, she gives cream of tomato soup, porterhouse steak with mushroom sauce, liver with bacon, chicken fricassee, asparagus with hollandaise, angel cake, coconut pie and jelly omelet. People might be a little surprised if you served some of her recipes today but not downright puzzled.

Farmer herself, a cookery teacher in sophisticated Boston, was a self-confident modern woman dedicated to promoting scientific cookery, which she identified with the elevation of the human race. Her book gave pretty clear technical explanations of what goes on as food cooks. (In discussing how to build a fire in a coal-burning range, she even paused to explain the process that takes place when you strike a match.) She is remembered for insisting on consistent measurement of ingredients and temperatures--which was a matter of practical as well as scientific significance for a cooking teacher, of course.

Another of the things that makes her seem so modern is her concern with nutrition. She began most chapters of “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” by discussing the nutritive content of the food (without mentioning vitamins, because they hadn’t been discovered yet). She partook moderately of the turn-of-the-century’s cereal mania, giving some recipes using graham (whole wheat) flour and recommending that parents give their children a health snack called Dr. Johnson’s Educators instead of sweet buns.

But once in a while in her 1,200-odd recipes, you may be struck by some reminder that she did live 100 years ago. She starts out making ham and eggs by poaching the sliced ham, because in her day the only kind of ham available was highly salted country-style ham. All her recipes for cocoa included the instruction to beat it with an egg beater, because until the (still very recent at the time) invention of cocoa, hot chocolate had always had to be whipped just before drinking or the melted chocolate would separate. Apparently it took people a while to get used to the fact that you don’t have to do this with cocoa.

There was some overlap of recipes with Simmons’ time. Farmer gave a recipe for beef a la mode (with some added vegetables), noting that a smaller piece of meat cooked this way is known as pot roast. Like Simmons, she gave recipes for both pound cake and its close relative, queen cake, made with less butter and slightly more flour. A chafing dish delicacy called chicken a la Metropole may go back to the 18th century chicken smothered in oysters. But “mango” by then meant the genuine tropical fruit, and Farmer mentioned the old-fashioned melon pickle “mango” only in her glossary of cooking terms.

Like Simmons, whose book was published in Connecticut, Farmer was very much a New Englander. As a cookery teacher, she picked up some Southern recipes from her students but labeled them clearly as Southern. Her own recipes often called for such typical Yankee ingredients as oysters, lobster, common crackers, molasses and maple sugar. She devoted a chapter to chowders, and her cream cakes were essentially Boston cream pies. She gave a Thanksgiving dinner menu totally in the New England style, from oyster soup through turkey with cranberry jelly, mashed potatoes, squash and creamed onions to mince, apple and squash pies.

Diet reformers had been attacking pie since shortly after the Civil War. Farmer’s Philadelphia-based contemporary, Sarah Tyson Rorer, excluded pie from her books, but Farmer wasn’t willing to do that.

“Pastry cannot be easily excluded from the menu of the New Englander,” she wrote. “Who can dream of a Thanksgiving dinner without a pie! The last decade has done much to remove pies from the daily bill of fare, and in their place are found delicate puddings and seasonable fruits.” But she proceeded to give about two dozen pie recipes.

What’s amazing is that she didn’t give a single recipe for any of the pie-like New England fruit desserts that lack a bottom crust, such as cobbler, grunt, pandowdy and brown betty. Amazingly, they didn’t sneak into the book until the 1930s.

For all the New England focus, Farmer looked to France a lot of the time. She gave a number of French dishes, including frogs’ legs (but not snails) and at least a dozen classic French sauces, one of them a thrifty simplified version of sauce espagnole. She devoted several pages to fussy French-style soup garnishes, such as croutons, quenelles and custard cut into fancy shapes. One of her apple pie recipes calls for baking the apples slowly for three hours before putting them into the pie crust, which looks like an Americanization of the French tarte Tatin.

Sometimes, her French dishes look to us as if she may have misunderstood something. Her caramel custard isn’t baked in a caramel-lined cup but flavored with caramel before cooking and served with caramel sauce.

The rationalistic French approach to cookery must have appealed to her scientific side, but of course the main attraction of French food, then as now, is that it represents wealth and sophistication. Most cookbooks written in Europe at Farmer’s time were equally Frenchified.

“Entrees” was apparently what she called elegant afternoon nibbles (the entree chapter appears in the book between salads and hot puddings), usually with a French pedigree. Her entrees included souffles, patties, brochettes, croquettes (minced ingredients, usually bound with white sauce, breaded and fried) and timbales (decorative pastry cups full of minced things in sauce).

Her sandwiches, too, with their crusts carefully trimmed off, belong in the old-fashioned elegant nibble category. Elegant evening nibbles were covered in the chafing dish chapter.

But along with these dainties (some of her pastries are a little like homemade petits fours), along with that new craze called salad and such fashionable desserts of the 1890s as gelatine, tapioca pudding and baked Alaska, Farmer gave a lot of practical, unglamorous dishes designed to be easy on the pocketbook: ways of using leftovers, such as scalloped dishes and “salmon box” (leftover salmon encased in leftover rice and baked); filling starchy dishes like macaroni in white sauce.

Some of Farmer’s homelier dishes haven’t survived, including rice a la Riston (cooked with bacon and cabbage) and cannelon (a sort of meatloaf flavored with lemon peel and nutmeg), though they appeared in various editions of the book for 70 years. A surprising number are very much alive, though, including creamed chipped beef (though Farmer didn’t mention serving it on toast) and prune whip.

A number of writers were putting together compendious recipe collections in the 1890s, but none of them stood the test of time. Fannie Farmer, with her keen interest in science, elegance and thrift, apparently struck just the right note for the American public. If her book looks familiar today, it’s because it’s had such influence on all American cookbooks since.

American Food: 1896

A lot of recipes in Fannie Farmer’s book would seem familiar to us, and a lot (like plain cake or bread sauce) might remind us that very strict economy was a more widespread necessity 100 years ago than it is today. The following recipes have been chosen to suggest the different flavor preferences in turn-of-the-century food.

JELLIED WALNUTS

With its modest wallop of alcohol, this is very much a turn-of-the-century special-occasion sweet.

1 (1/4-ounce) envelope (1 1/4 tablespoons) unflavored gelatin

1/3 cup boiling water

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup sherry

1/2 cup orange juice

3 tablespoons lemon juice

16 walnut halves

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add sugar, sherry, orange juice and lemon juice. Cover bottom of 8-inch square pan with 1/2 of mixture and refrigerate. When firm (about 15 minutes), put walnut halves 1 inch apart on surface of gelatin. Cover with remaining gelatin mixture, refrigerate and cut into squares for serving.

Makes 16 servings.

Each serving contains about:

71 calories; 1 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 11 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram protein; 0.10 gram fiber.

TARTAR SAUCE

No recipe in Farmer’s book appears to call for this sauce, but it looks like a sauce for fish--though it doesn’t resemble at all the familiar mayonnaise-based sauce tartare (which Farmer also gives).

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1/3 cup butter

Heat vinegar, lemon juice, salt and Worcestershire in small bowl over hot water. Brown butter in skillet and strain into vinegar mixture.

Makes 2 to 4 servings.

Each of 2 servings contains about:

271 calories; 721 mg sodium; 82 mg cholesterol; 30 grams fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0 fiber.

DEVILED TOMATOES

Fried red tomatoes Fannie Farmer-style, with a sauce like a mustardy boiled dressing.

DEVIL DRESSING

1/4 cup butter

2 teaspoons powdered sugar

1 teaspoon mustard

1/4 teaspoon salt

Cayenne

Yolk of 1 hard-boiled egg, rubbed to paste

1 raw egg, slightly beaten

2 tablespoons vinegar

Cream butter by beating until light and fluffy. Add sugar, mustard, salt, dash cayenne, mashed yolk, beaten egg and vinegar. Cook in top of double boiler, stirring constantly, until sauce thickens. Makes 1/2 cup sauce.

FRIED TOMATOES

3 tomatoes

Salt, pepper

Flour

Butter

Peel tomatoes and cut into slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, dredge with flour and saute in butter. Place on hot platter and pour Devil Dressing over.

Makes 2 servings.

Each serving contains about:

474 calories; 892 mg sodium; 351 mg cholesterol; 46 grams fat; 11 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; 0.32 gram fiber.

PECAN-MOLASSES BROWNIES

Call them “tannies”--there’s no chocolate at all in these gingerbready cupcakes. This is the only recipe in Farmer’s book called a brownie.

5 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup molasses

1 egg, beaten

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons flour

1 cup cut-up pecan meats

12 whole pecans

Mix butter, sugar and molasses. Add egg. Mix in flour. Spoon into 12 greased small, shallow fancy cake tins and garnish top of each cake with 1 whole pecan. Bake at 350 degrees until golden, 15 to 20 minutes.

Makes 12 cookies.

Each cookie contains about:

168 calories; 58 mg sodium; 31 mg cholesterol; 10 grams fat; 19 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams protein; 0.14 gram fiber.

American Food: 1796

Because of changes in cooking technology, Amelia Simmons’ recipes have a decidedly quaint look. Many are very enjoyable by any standards, though, apart from offering a unique window on what life was like two centuries ago.

INDIAN SLAPJACKS

In 18th and 19th century recipes, the term “Indian” referred to Indian meal, which was cornmeal. These slapjacks are just what you’d think: corn-flavored pancakes.

1 quart milk

2 cups cornmeal

4 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup flour

Salt

Mix milk, cornmeal, eggs, flour and dash salt. Pour 1/4 cup at time on greased griddle or skillet and fry until bubbles appear and surface starts to dry out, then turn over and fry on other side 1 minute. Serve with butter and syrup.

Makes 24 slapjacks.

Each serving, without butter or syrup, contains about:

281 calories; 246 mg sodium; 69 mg cholesterol; 10 grams fat; 31 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 0.08 gram fiber.

APPLE PUDDING

This is really a sort of custard pie scented with apples and rose water. Simmons’ recipe calls for 1/4 cup rose water, which would be overwhelming; possibly she was used to much weaker rose water than today’s. For the crust, she calls for a sort of puff paste made with lard and butter, but the result doesn’t seem worth the trouble, and we have substituted a plain crust made in something Simmons could have never imagined--a food processor.

FILLING

1/2 pound apples

1 cup sugar

5 eggs

1/4 cup butter

1 pint whipping cream

1/2 to 1 teaspoon rose water

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Grated peel of 1/2 lemon or lime

Juice of 1/2 lemon or lime, optional

Peel and quarter apples. Stew in water until soft, then puree and sieve out seeds and hard parts. Add sugar, eggs, butter, cream, rose water and cinnamon. Add grated peel and (if apples are sweet) lemon juice, then combine.

CRUST

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup shortening

1/3 cup ice water, about

Briefly pulse flour and salt in food processor to mix. Add shortening and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal, 2 to 3 pulses. With motor running, add ice water slowly until dough forms ball.

Remove and roll to fit 9-inch pie pan. Line pie pan with dough, fill with apple filling and bake at 350 degrees until center of pie rises and is golden, 60 to 70 minutes.

Makes 12 servings.

Each serving contains about:

350 calories; 178 mg sodium; 143 mg cholesterol; 24 grams fat; 30 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 0.14 gram fiber.

LEMON CREAM

Many of Simmons’ recipes look so strange we’re tempted to “correct” them. In this case, following the recipe exactly gives something very, very lemony (think of lemonade concentrate straight from the can) with a slippery texture like gelatin that is never going to set up. It’s intense and oddly elegant, and we have to conclude it’s exactly what Simmons intended.

Juice of 4 lemons

1 cup water

1 pound sugar

1 egg

6 egg whites

Grated peel of 1 lemon

Mix lemon juice, water and sugar. Beat egg and egg whites together and strain into lemon juice mixture. Add lemon peel. Set in top of double boiler over boiling water and stir and skim until slightly thickened; do not allow to boil. Remove peel and pour lemon cream into dishes.

Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

326 calories; 61 mg sodium; 35 mg cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 78 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 0 fiber.

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Egg Note

Fannie Farmer and Amelia Simmons didn’t worry about Salmonellain eggs when they wrote their cookbooks. Currently, although many recipes still call for uncooked eggs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that diners--especially those with weakened immune systems, small children and pregnant women--avoid eating raw eggs. The lemon cream recipe on page H8 and the devil dressing for the deviled tomatoes are two recipes to avoid or alter if you are concerned about serving raw eggs.